Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s “strange cadences”: Rereading Spinster and Incense to Idols

Abstract

Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s fiction achieved considerable international success, particularly her novels Spinster (1958) and Incense to Idols (1960), which both reached Time magazine’s best books list. This achievement meant that Ashton-Warner was able to resign from teaching and focus on being a fulltime writer and she was eventually awarded an MBE in 1982. Ashton-Warner’s success in literature was matched by her work in education and over the past 50 years there has been a significant body of criticism from scholars in that field analysing her non-fiction as well as her novels. Ashton-Warner’s significance as a writer makes her continuing neglect by literary critics in her homeland of New Zealand all the more curious. This article argues that Ashton-Warner’s novels are neglected in New Zealand literary culture largely because they were published at a time when local criticism privileged a mode of masculinist realism and that their recuperation by feminist scholars keen to challenge the restricted canon has been problematized by their author’s divisive personality, as well as by the conventional conclusions of her novels that tend to involve a level of containment. By taking a feminist approach to two of Ashton-Warner’s most popular novels — Spinster and Incense to Idols — this article aims to demonstrate how they utilize, extend, and subvert modes of writing associated with popular female fiction in order to explore the contradictions of prevailing versions of mid-twentieth-century femininity.